Y2K

Fortunately this Jericho centered episode only has a small recap of how the Monday Night Wars started. It opens with Jericho saying how people told him he was too small to succeed at wrestling. Before coming to WCW he wrestled in Japan and Mexico honing his craft. He also spent time in ECW. He debuted on Nitro on 8/26/96 as a squeaky clean good guy, which did not go over as well with the crowd as this was right when the rebellious NWO was starting. Clips are shown of him getting beat up by Scott Norton and Scott Hall.

Eventually WCW official Terry Taylor told him he was turning heel, which he did on 1/24/98 at the Souled Out Pay Per View. Having more success as a heel, he feuded with Goldberg, mocking him calling him Greenburg, defeating fake Goldbergs and mocking his entrance by going out the wrong door and accidentally locking himself out of the building, having his own fake security, etc. After beating a fake Goldberg he even had a shirt that read Jericho 1, Goldberg 0.

However as this angle was used WCW management was hesitant to actually give a Jericho/Goldberg match. Rey Mysterio is interviewed in this episode and says Goldberg hated the idea. Jericho says Goldberg, Hogan, and Bischoff hated it. Bischoff says he didn’t see Jericho as a main eventer, and Goldberg is on camera saying he thought it was a good angle, but didn’t want Jericho to have a clean victory. We see Goldberg spear Jericho on Nitro, but there never was a pay per view match, and the feud fizzled. From here he went to the WWF.

Jericho was brought into the WWF with much fanfare. The year 2000 was approaching, and there was much angst in the culture about the end of the world and the Y2K virus. One day Jericho was in the Post Office and saw a clock that was counting down to the millennium. This gave him the idea of how the WWF could introduce him. While Jericho was still on contract from WCW, vignettes ran on Raw of a millennium clock counting down. The clock ran out on Raw on 8/9/99, when Jericho finally debuted and verbally starred with the Rock, who was red hot himself at the time and arguably the best talker in the business.

That night Dean Malenko and Jericho’s other friends were watching Raw in the Nitro dressing room in secret. Someone was even in charge of watching the door. It sounded like something out of a prison movie.

However, things did not go so smoothly during his early days in the WWF. He says the boys in the locker room didn’t like him at first, since he was from enemy territory. Big Show describes how Jericho would walk into the locker room and everyone would stop talking.

Jericho was able to rebound, and the episode ends with his post Monday Night Wars success at the 12/9/01 PPV, where he defeated both the Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin in the same night to become the first WWF Undisputed Champion (uniting the old WCW title with the WWF title).

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I write as a hobby, and am self publishing comic books, prose, and poetry which are available on my Hard Coal Studios website. My works include Classic Horror Comics, Frankenstein: The Illuminatus Complex, and a poetry collection entitled Almost Normal.